Parallels between Grendel and Oedipus RexA messenger hastily arrives at a palace to tell King Oedipus that his father, Polybus, king of another city, has died in old age of natural causes . The recipient of the message and his queen, therefore, assume that Oedipus has escaped his fate, as the oracle of Delphi had told him that he should kill his father and marry his mother. There is respite from worry until it is revealed that the dead man was simply Oedipus' adoptive father and that Oedipus had once actually killed his father and was married to his mother. Oedipus was not the king of his destiny. “‘Pointless accident,’ not a pattern, rules the world, says Grendel, who, accordingly, adopts an existentialist stance,” explains Frank Magill in Critical Review of Short Fiction. This point has been made in numerous critical articles by various essayists. One might wonder, however, whether this is the only way to interpret an incredibly ambiguous story in which no question is ever clearly answered or clearly formulated. One might actually ask whether the author really intended to analyze his work in this way. The author, John Gardner, tells the story of a monster closely linked to his destiny of unnatural death. No matter what Grendel does, his death is predetermined. Although he tries to disprove fate himself by believing in existentialism, the belief that actions create the future, he never validates that view. John Gardner's purpose in writing Grendel was to express that the future is completely inevitable. Grendel can be compared to Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" which describes the story of Laius and Jocasta, the king and a queen of Thebes, told by the oracle. to Delphi that their newborn son's fate will be to one day kill his father and marry his mother. They believe they can change that fate by killing the child, but their plan backfires when, without warning, the child grows away and fulfills his destiny by eventually killing Laius and marrying Jocasta, neither of whom he knows are his parents. "Oedipus Rex" is analogous to Grendel because in both stories the protagonist has an exceptionally clear destiny but simply does not believe in it, on the contrary, he believes that his actions will create his future, but he is tragically wrong.